The Congo: Long Finger of the Law

To Evariste Kassanda, 33-year-old chief of the Congo's elite Police des Mines, nearly everyone and everything coming out of the diamond-rich Kasai province is suspect. In search of an estimated $20 million in diamonds a year smuggled out of the Congo, he and his men have found contraband gems hid den in elephant tusks, embedded in bars of soap, even pumped into the stomachs of small edible crocodiles on their way to market.

The smugglers' tactic that Kassanda finds hardest to handle is the use of what he calls the "secret cavities" of the human body. Three weeks ago, he caught six smugglers — four men and two women — loaded with diamonds privately concealed. So it was that last week one John Wina was asked to bend over and submit to the routine check when he showed up in Kinshasa fresh from the mining country. The law's probing finger produced six capsules of white diamonds. Kassanda's cops some how felt they had missed a carat or two. Over Wina's shrill protests, they applied a purgative, and voila, as if by magic, there suddenly appeared 60 more plastic capsules containing no less than 1,500 carats of diamonds.

In order to halt the smuggling, the Congo government has put major mining areas under martial law and increased the fines and jail sentences on contraband gem carriers. Kassanda is urging even stronger measures. "If not, smugglers will continue the traffic using their secret cavities," he says, "and all the fingers of the mines' police will not be enough to block the smuggling of our diamonds."